Bitcoin’s slowly overtaking Mastercard daily transfer volume
The #1 cryptocurrency could soon overtake Mastercard’s daily transfer volume, judging by the official numbers released by Mastercard. This means Bitcoin is becoming a serious rival of the leading traditional money transfer system.
According to company’s public records, Mastercard has a daily volume of $11 billion, while Bitcoin on the other hand, transfers around $8 billion per day, meaning that it moves 73% of Mastercard’s volume. While Bitcoin daily transfer is especially noteable given the current situation in the crypto markets, it may seem that the cryptocurrency is already moving amount comparable to those handled by Mastercard.
Mastercardreports that it has processed transactions worth a incredible $4.4trillion since the beginning of the year. Although there’s no such statistic accessible for Bitcoin, it’s possible to accumulate it’s daily transfers. Supposably $8 billion daily transfer volume would mean Bitcoin could have an annual volume of $3 trillion, which is a incredible number for any transfer system, especially a cryptocurrency.
Ethereum, which transfers the second-highest daily volume, processed around $600 million in the 24-hour span. That would mean it equals approximately $0.25 trillion annualy. Moreover, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are also having a noteable amount of daily transfers, approximately $170 million and $120 million, respectively.
Despite having a far lower capacity in transactions per second, it could be speculated that all cryptocurrencies put together could rival Mastercard’s daily transfers. While Mastercards volume mostly stems from small purchases, cryptocurrency transaction could be worth millions. Although Mastercard’s main rival is Visa, which is handling 65.000 transactions per second, processes around $30 billion daily volume, that equals roughly $11 trillion a year. Given that Bitcoin supports 7 tx/s on-chain, it would equal only 0.01% of Visa’s transaction capacity, the premier cryptocurrency still transfers around 25% of the value processed by Visa.